How Our Built Environments Impact Our Health and Well-Being More Than We Knew

New research is providing startling evidence for the importance of livable, beautiful places for personal and planetary health -- as researchers will discuss at the 61st International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference in Cortona, Italy

CORTONA, ITALY - Researchers will gather here from October 29th through November 1st with city officials, NGO heads, practitioners and citizens, to assess the latest findings about making cities livable, and explore ways to translate those findings into effective action in policy, education, and especially, reformed practice.

One of the central findings is that the architecture of our surroundings has a profound effect on our health and well-being, and on the lifestyles we are likely to lead. This is true even when we are not consciously aware of these impacts -- as is often the case.

"Our built environment profoundly affects us at a physiological level, even outside our conscious perception," says Cleo Valentine, a researcher at the University of Cambridge. She studies "neuroimmunology," the interaction between the nervous system and the immune system.

Valentine has found that environmental stressors can affect the body's immune system, including stress generated by what the user experiences as unpleasant forms of buildings and environments. There is even startling new evidence that these stressors can provoke unhealthy inflammatory response in the body and brain, which are linked to diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other disorders.

"Historically, people really thought that the immune system and the nervous system in the brain were entirely distinct, and we now know that that's really not the case. In fact, there's this very kind of intimate connection between the two," says Valentine.

Valentine stresses that "all these kinds of neuroinflammatory or neurodegenerative conditions are the result of multiple causes. But I think that what we're trying to highlight here is that the built environment may be a contributing factor, and it's something that has largely gone overlooked. We don't fully understand the magnitude of the impact that we can have."

She sees positive aspects to these findings too. "What we're seeing is that the built environment is an incredible tool for public health intervention, and there are kinds of wide reaching effects that can be had. The flip of it is that it comes with an incredible responsibility."

Valentine concludes that architects and planners need to design for users and their well-being, and not just for their own specialized interests and tastes.

"We are forced to live in and around built environments. Most of us don't have much say in that actually. We have to move through these spaces, and we very often don't actively consent to the impacts that they may have on us," she says. "We are actually bound as practitioners to try and respect and support public health.... We have to recognize that profound ethical obligation."

Also participating in the conference is Kostas Mouratidis, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen. He has done research on user reactions to different buildings with the aid of virtual reality devices, allowing users to experience the same structures under highly controlled conditions.

Mouratidis has found that "there is a preference among people towards more traditional styles in architecture.... they don't need to be old buildings, necessarily, but they need to be buildings that have a facade that is characterized by symmetry, in contrast with contemporary architecture, and some degree of ornamentation, again in contrast with contemporary architecture.”

Mouratidis concludes that architecture needs to reflect residents’ needs and preferences, not those of the designers. “Unfortunately, we have an increasing amount of evidence that the majority of residents do not like, and do not prefer, and do not feel comfortable with the existing developments in architecture -- for example, how new neighborhoods or new building complexes are being built, from an aesthetic point of view," He says. Echoing Cleo Valentine's findings, he notes that "this is not only aesthetic, because it has an impact on our feelings and our well-being."

Architects and builders need a framework “that help us think about how we shape cities and urban environments in order to create livable spaces and improve people’s lives,” Mouratidis says. “We need to think about all these different pathways, as I call them, through which the urban environment influences people’s lives, and in so many different ways.”

Several other researchers and leaders in the field of cognitive architecture, livability and health will also speak at the conference, including Ann Sussman of The Human Architecture and Planning Institute in Boson, Massachusetts, and Alexandros Lavdas, a researcher at the EURAC Research Center in Bolzano, Italy.

Cleo Valentine wants us to understand that the issue of human health is also tied to planetary health and ecological lifestyles, including walkability, low-carbon living, healthy food, and much more. "I think we've got a lot more interdisciplinary research in the field... breaking apart of these silos which is slowly happening," she says. "There's a lot of people doing a lot of really incredible work."

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The IMCL series will continue to gather researchers and disseminate these findings to city leaders, professionals and citizens. More information about the next conference is at https://www.imcl.online/2024-cortona.

Wonders of the "Urban Connectome"

Cities are like brains—immense networks of connective tissue between people, places and events. Understanding this underlying connective structure can help us to formulate better urban policies and practices.

ABOVE: Jane Jacobs' "sidewalk ballet" occurs across many complex layers of urban space, like this example of immigrants, shop owners and passers-by in Oslo, Norway. They are passing through specific room-like spaces and zones with specific connective properties, including the streets, sidewalks, shops, private homes, and so on. Photo by Michael Mehaffy

NOTE: The following is a discussion topic offered for the 61st International Making Cities Livable conference in Cortona, Italy. We can see many examples of thriving "place networks" in the hill towns of Tuscany, and in many other parts of the world. But these places are under threat -- perhaps not least because we don't understand their crucial structure, or how to protect and enhance it.

CORTONA, ITALY - Urbanists have long been drawing lessons from other disciplines, including sociology, environmental psychology and ecology. Now there are intriguing new lessons being offered by a perhaps surprising field: brain science. But to explore the story of those lessons, we'll have to start first with genetics.

Few developments in the sciences have had the impact of the revolutionary discoveries in genetics, and in particular, what is called the “genome”—the totality of the complex pattern of genetic information that produces the proteins and other structures of life. By getting a clearer picture of the workings of this evolving, generative structure, we gain dramatic new insights on disease processes, on cellular mechanisms, and on the ultimate wonders of life itself. In a similar way, geneticists now speak of the “proteome”—the no less complex structure of proteins and their workings that generate tissues, organs, signaling molecules, and other element of complex living processes.

An important characteristic of both the genome and the proteome is that they work as totalities, with any one part potentially interacting with any other. In that sense, they are immense interactive networks, with the pattern of connections shaping the interactions, and in turn being shaped by them through a process of self-organization. Proteins produce other proteins; genes switch on other genes. In this way, the structure of our bodies evolves and adapts to new conditions—new infections, new stresses, new environments. Our bodies “learn.”

It turns out that something very similar goes on in the brain. We are born with a vastly complex pattern of connections between our neurons, and these go on to change after birth as we experience new environments and learn new skills and concepts. Once again, the totality of the pattern is what matters, and the ways that different parts of the brain get connected (or disconnected) to form new patterns, new ideas and pictures of the world.  

Following the naming precedent in genetics, this complex neural structure is now being called the “connectome” (because it’s a structure that’s similar to a “genome”). The race is on to map this structure and its most important features. (Much of this work is being advanced by the NIH’s Human Connectome Project.)

The structure of a "connectome," or a differentiated web-network, which is common to brain structure, artificial neural networks (that power AI), genomes, ecologies, and many other systems in the natural and human world -- including cities. Drawing by Michael Mehaffy.

What do these insights have to do with cities? As Steven Johnson noted in his book Emergence, there is more in common between the two structures than might appear. There is good reason to think that, as with brains, a lot of what happens in cities has more to do with the overall pattern of connections, and less to do with particular elements.

As Jane Jacobs pointed out over half a century ago, the city is a kind of “intricate ballet” of people interacting, going about their plans, and shaping the life of the city, from the smallest scales to the largest. This intricate pattern is complex, but it’s far from random. As Jacobs argued, it exhibits a high degree of order — what she called “organized complexity.”

And it’s physical, starting at the scale of the sidewalk, and encompassing all the other movements and connections of urban activity. “Sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow,” she wrote. We may also be plugged in electronically by telephone and now Internet, but (as new research is showing) the root of the system is the physical proximity with the people we know and work with.

More than that, this pattern of connections generates remarkable efficiencies, forming a kind of “network metabolism.” Jacobs has since become famous for observing highly local “knowledge spillovers,” casual transfers of knowledge about a job or a new tool or idea, that help to grow new enterprises and new economic activities. Her insight, now called a “Jacobs externality” by economists in her honor, helps to explain how a city generates wealth. As we have written before, this phenomenon might well help to explain why cities are so efficient with resources per person, relative to other places.

In the same vein, the brain scientists offer some other important insights. For one thing, more important than the density per se (of neurons, or of people) are the patterns of connections. We have to be able to ensure that many “neural pathways” can form and re-form—in the case of a person’s brain, that the person is healthy and well-nourished enough to remember, and learn. In the case of cities, we have to ensure that we have well-connected, walkable cities, facilitating many cross-connections.

The brain scientists even believe now that this pattern of neural cross-connection is key to the formation of consciousness. In effect, the different parts of the brain join up into a larger cloud-like unit, and the result is that the system self-organizes into a state that is smarter and more aware. When a brain sleeps, this larger cloud-like pattern seems to dissolve into fleeting sub-patterns—and we experience the loss of consciousness, and sometimes, dreaming.

Something similar might be going on with well-connected cities: they can self-organize to become “smarter” in their ability to generate great urban vitality with fewer resources. But this is true only if their “neurons” (the people) are able to be connected, especially physically connected, in this way.

Similarly, a city can “lose consciousness” by becoming too fragmented and too sprawling. Automobiles and other machinery can help to connect the parts of the city, but only in a very limited and encapsulated way. By contrast, a walkable public realm has vastly more capacity to form and re-form connections between people, allowing a dynamic pattern of interaction to form and sustain across the city’s urban fabric.

This lesson of self-organization carries an important implication for planners and urban designers. It suggests we need to focus less on the specific elements in relation to one another—and how we might imagine they are best placed—and focus more on how we can help them to self-organize into more complex (and more efficient) patterns.

On the other hand, human brains do not start from scratch as we once thought, nor do societies—we all have patterns that we learn and apply to new situations. So too, cities have patterns that facilitate this network structure. Like a good memory or innate knowledge, the best walkable cities of history offer us many good reusable patterns to create vibrant, walkable, resource-efficient cities.

A corollary is that in our automobile-connected suburbs, it seems we have been replicating this pattern of connections, but only crudely — and only with heavy and unsustainable inputs of resources. We have replaced the vital self-organizing tissue of connections with an overly encapsulated system, and then expending vast quantities of non-renewable resources to re-connect ourselves in offices, commercial "third places," and other artificial gathering places.

Furthermore, as noted before, the structure of encapsulated cars, and existing networks of people we already know, are no match for the open-ended nature of public space networks, and their capacity to exploit “propinquity and serendipity”—the accidental connections with people we don’t already know, where, as research shows, the new knowledge and innovations form. If we want more resource-efficient cities—and more creative and resilient economies—then it seems we will have to look much harder at this dynamic, and ways to exploit it to our advantage.

Mapping the “urban connectome”

How can we do this, concretely? The brain scientists are working hard to map the connective patterns of particular brains, to get some idea of how the patterns tend to form characteristically within the “human connectome.” For cities, it seems we might do something equally useful: map the characteristic urban patterns that have proven most conducive to this connected vitality, and that also do not interfere with—or better yet that promote—the capacity for urban self-organization.

In a sense, we already do this when we speak of design types, or planning models. But this work is usually very constrained by parochial debates within the architecture and urban design disciplines over “progressivism” versus “historicism.” The result is that there has been a catastrophic stagnation of real progress in this area. At worst, we have slipped into what Jacobs called a “neurosis” of “imitating empiric failure, and ignoring empiric success.”

By contrast, the brain scientists point to another, less ideologically constrained path. It seems we might have much to learn from a more open, aggressive mapping and re-applying the genetic patterns of such an “urban connectome,” looking at the most effective patterns from a range of cities around the world—and over centuries of evolution. In effect, we are after a "DNA of place" -- giving us the genetic material to express as healthy and vital places, and to evolve and adapt under new conditions too.

It seems there are several practical implications of this work.  One is that we can begin to usefully map the ways that public and private spaces form, connect, cluster and transform over time, into what we have termed “place networks.” We can observe how more successful spaces have characteristic patterns of place-network relationships that we can manage better, and perhaps incorporate into more lively and successful new places.

A complex layering of connected public and private realms in a fairly ordinary section of a London high street. The "urban rooms" (including ordinary interior rooms) are connected, and not connected, in a complex pattern that users control. Ultimately they are all connected to the street and to the city's public space network. Photo montage by Michael Mehaffy.

In our own recent work, we have found this approach to be a remarkably effective inter-disciplinary method, combining many different spatial aspects including movement, enclosure, privacy and even aesthetic experience, and at many different urban and architectural scales—down to the “intricate sidewalk ballet” described by Jacobs.

Another practical implication is that we can find a new usefulness in tools that can capture these various urban and architectural patterns, so that they can be re-combined and re-used in a contextual, networked way. Perhaps the most common such tool is the pattern language methodology developed by the architect Christopher Alexander. (This essentially networked methodology led directly to spinoffs including Wiki, Agile, and other productive tools for a more effectively networked world.)

As one example of this new usefulness in urban environments, we recently developed a new “pattern language for growing regions” in partnership with UN-Habitat and other collaborators. It contains a number of urban patterns that can capture certain features of the “urban connectome,” including circulation networks, walkable streetscapes, layered zones, small groups of elements, and other patterns. These and other kinds of patterns are aimed at a new generation of challenges, including rapid urbanization, the proliferation of sprawl, the over-focus on object-buildings, and the decline of public space in many cities around the world. 

In a sense, the challenge for urbanism is not unlike the challenge for brain science. We need a better understanding of the way our brains work, and sometimes don’t work, so that we can develop better tools to intervene when the brain’s health is threatened. With those tools and that understanding, we can then preserve and enhance consciousness, memory and learning, as conditions for a healthy life.

So too in the city: we need to preserve and build upon the learning of decades and centuries, the memory of heritage, and the consciousness and intelligence of a connected, vital city.

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NOTE: An earlier version of this post appeared on the online journals Public Square and Planetizen, as well as the Future of Places Research Network website.

Instead of Aiming for Sustainable Urbanism, Perhaps We Should Target its Opposite?

A new paper in the journal Sustainability suggests that while the term is vague and difficult to implement, we can take more effective actions to counter the obvious UN-sustainable patterns that are all around us -- along with the institutional and cultural forms of "lock-in" that perpetuate them

ABOVE: Left, the Pantheon in Rome, a remarkable exemplar of urban sustainability in continuous use for 1,900 years, in a splendid walkable mixed-use context; center and right, in stark contrast, a 1937 advertisement from Life Magazine, just 87 years ago, effectively marketing a problematic urban model subsequently implemented in cities across the globe, like Dallas, Texas (shown at right). Images: Left, Nono vlf via Wikimedia Commons; center, philafrenzy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain); and right, Google Maps.

CORTONA, ITALY - At a time of growing threats to urban and planetary well-being, the 61st International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference, to take place here from October 29th to November 1st, will focus on the topic of sustainable urbanism. For it is in cities that we conduct most of our interactions, daily movements, consumptions, and all the other impacts we humans generate in and on our world.

To explore this topic, leading researchers in urbanism, architecture, sociology, health, complexity science, and other fields, will join leading city officials, practitioners, NGO heads, and other city leaders from across the globe at the IMCL conference. The focus will be on the current generation of urban challenges, and sharing the latest effective solutions.

Partners and participating organizations will include The King's Foundation (UK), UN-Habitat, the Congress for the New Urbanism, The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), the Center on African Public Space, the Journal of Public Space, the World Farmers Market Coalition, Seaside Institute, HealthBridge, and other globally active organizations in developing a new generation of more truly sustainable, ecological, beautiful and livable urbanism.

Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director of the Lennard Institute, will discuss a new paper titled "UN-Sustainable Urbanism: The Challenge of 'Lock-In,'” just published in the international Journal Sustainability. The article is part of a special issue that Mehaffy guest-edited, titled "Sustainable Urbanism: Definition, Assessment, and Agenda for Future Research." A number of past IMCL conference participants also contributed to the issue, in addition to Mehaffy.

Rather than focus on abstract ideas of what a sustainable urban future would look like -- which tends to draw unprovable theories, ideological claims and too often, sheer fantasies -- Mehaffy suggests that we focus instead on the more tangible patterns of UN-sustainable urbanism: "Specifically, forms of urbanism that cause an unacceptable buildup of toxic or climate-altering emissions, deplete resources beyond sustainable levels, progressively destroy critical ecologies, and cause other identifiable sources of potentially catastrophic harm to human and urban welfare." To that, Mehaffy suggests, we could add the less obvious forms of social isolation, cultural estrangement and institutional erosion that are increasingly evident in research findings, and that are associated with the decline of public life in modern cities. All of these are deeply interrelated, he concludes.

Mehaffy identifies four main factors of un-sustainable urbanism:

1. Over-reliance on low-occupancy, high-consumption vehicular transport.

2. Inefficient envelope, size, orientation, and adaptability of buildings.

3. Ecologically destructive systems for handling water and energy.

4. Decline of a well-ordered, walkable, functionally and visually appealing public realm.

The last factor is the least understood, he argues, and yet it is also perhaps the most important of all. In many ways, he says, the last factor is a result of the other three factors (e.g., dominance of low-occupancy vehicles; large, inefficient and poorly connected buildings; and degraded infrastructure resources in a sprawling public realm). In turn, however, the declining public realm exacerbates the other three factors, and multiplies their effects.

Mehaffy proposes a "four-factor model" of unsustainable urbanism, with a degraded public realm as a "multiplier" of the other three. The model allows measurement of the four factors and their potential impacts on human and natural systems.

Why is this unsustainable urban model still prevalent? Mehaffy argues that there is systemic "lock-in" -- that is, self-perpetuating forms of institutional and cultural feedback that incentivize business-as-usual and do not permit needed reforms. Some of those are so-called "path-dependent" patterns, similar to ingrained institutional habits that are hard to change.

Others are the product of obsolete ideologies, including the ideological model of cities created in the early- and mid-20th century. That model was incisively critiqued by Jane Jacobs and others for its overly simplistic practice of functionally segregating the parts of a city -- witheringly described by Jacobs as "decontaminated sortings."

ABOVE, a 1948 drawing by Adolf Bayer titled "Order... Disorder", proposing that the historic city is one of disease, overcrowding, and disorder, whereas the "modern" city would be a sanitary, orderly, rational place. In fact, the scheme on the left features highly segregated functions, or what Jane Jacobs called "decontaminated sortings." Crucially, it also lacks a meaningful or coherent public realm, instead relying on long isolated walkways and encapsulated buildings and vehicles.

The specific actions we need to take then become evident. Many of them are already under way at a number of scales, although they need to be greatly accelerated:

1. Reduce and re-balance low-occupancy, high-consumption vehicular transport with walkable and bikable infrastructure and urban mixed use.

2. Improve the thermal envelope, human-scale size, public-private orientation, and adaptability of buildings -- especially their durability and lovability.

3. Replace ecologically destructive systems for handling water and energy with more integrated ecological systems.

4. Perhaps most important of all, regenerate a well-ordered, walkable, functionally and visually appealing public realm, using placemaking, "urban acupuncture," New Urban planning principles, and other readily available (and newly developed) tools and strategies. 

Mehaffy also points to a cognitive form of lock-in that he calls “modernity bias.” It is an explicit -- if unsupported by evidence -- theory within portions of academia, and a tacit assumption within much of the general public, that “that was then and this is now, and we just can’t (and shouldn't) do that anymore”. Various rationales are given, each of which can be swatted down with empirical evidence and counter-examples—but, meanwhile, another pops up, as in the child’s game Whack-a-Mole. “It isn’t practical”; “it’s too expensive”; “people won’t like it”; “it doesn’t have artistic merit”; and so on. Mehaffy continues:

One of the most powerful factors within this entrenched bias—if perhaps the least recognized—is the idea that the building aesthetics must be aggressively novel in a neo- modernist character if the project is to have any artistic merit. This idea is a reflection of a historically peculiar but remarkably poorly examined conception of the relationship between urban art (and architecture) and urban life. It is in fact a dysfunctional approach to the place of art in the city, as the urban journalist Jane Jacobs famously observed. We need art in cities, Jacobs argued, to illuminate our lives and enrich their meanings. But we must not allow art to substitute itself for urban life and thereby damage the life of the city and its citizens. We must not turn the city into a kind of sculpture garden of disconnected art objects. The result, she said, is neither art nor life, but “taxidermy”.

A key consequence of this confusion between art and life, and this tendency to impose an aggressive form of abstract art as a pattern for the aesthetics of buildings, is a widespread dislike by the public of new sustainable urban projects that are not built on preferred traditional aesthetic patterns. This finding is documented by a large body of survey research. At the same time, new research is documenting that this difference between users and professionals may have more to do with innate neuroaesthetic and cognitive needs than with the ideological or semiotic associations that are typically the focus of designers. Put differently, those who dwell in a place have different needs than those who create that place. If we are professionally committed to serving the actual needs of residents, and addressing the dynamics of their sustainable or unsustainable behaviors, it seems this issue must be taken much more seriously by architects, educators, and institutional decision-makers.

As Jacobs advised, there is certainly a crucial place for art in cities, as an enriching and illuminating dimension of urban experience. But the art must be integrated with the life of a place and its people, in a healthy reciprocal balance.

But when the art hijacks the life of the place and its people, we are all in trouble. And our cities will surely become unsustainable.

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This and other topics will be discussed and debated at the 61st International Making Cities Livable conference in Cortona, October 28th through November 1st, 2024. Please join us!